Employee Wellness and Carbs?

Hey Health Heroes, Anthony Diaz here coming to you from Hero City over in San Mateo, CA. Typically what I do is, as most of you know, I get up around 4:30 in the morning to start my day. Usually, around this point, I like to go for a long walk, meditate, and eat a very low carb lunch. But what I wanted to talk to you a little bit today is about low carbs and/or zero carb diets and basically how they can be promoted a little bit more on employee wellness programs.

I’m not a doctor and I’m not promoting zero carb or keto, but I do encourage everyone, a little bit, to look into what this is all about. I wanted to share with you my lunch for today and also for employee wellness programs and for healthy populations, that there is a strong correlation to the amount of carbohydrates and sugar that your employees eat and how healthy your population may be. Carbs are the hidden sugar and carbs are the hidden evil sugar. Now, it’s getting easier and easier to avoid them. But it’s really that rice that white bread and all of those carbohydrates that sneak into your breakfast and your lunch and, unless you’re a Olympian, you really don’t need as many cards as what you think. So, again, not here to promote anything, but what I’ll do is take a picture here and share with you of what I’m eating for lunch.

Source: Anthony Diaz

So I went to my local coffee shop and I found this really cool hack where they really actually cater to any type of lifestyle. But, what I did is I ordered a medium sized coffee with extra coconut milk. I put in there cold half skinny milk and I actually had them put in heavy whipping cream.

Right now I’m in something called ketosis, where my body is basically burning ketones off right now and I won’t go into the science and, again, I’m not here to promote it. But basically, right now I feel very mentally focused. I don’t feel any insulin like spikes up and down because I’m not eating sugar and eating four times as much more protein than I am; I’m sorry four times as much more fat than I am eating protein. So, roughly a 4 to 1 ratio. You can look into macros and how that pertains to ketosis. But, essentially, I also bought these great avocado spreads that are really good, two cheese sticks and a yogurt. Now, this is something that can throw me off a little bit. But it’s really interesting. I love these yogurts because they only have nine grams of sugar, 15 grams of protein and12 carbohydrates. Now, I need to be mindful of that because in ketosis if you knock yourself over 40 grams of carbohydrates in a day you can knock yourself out of ketosis and then you have to put your body kind of back into a fasting mode. Anyway, I wanted to kind of share with you a little bit on what a a a zero carb or almost zero to no carb lunch kind of looks like.

When you’re rolling out an employee wellness program and looking at different activities that you’re promoting, whether you’re integrating with tools like My Fitness Pal or Apple Health, what we found as a company is that companies that promote very low carb ways of eating, tend to be a little bit more healthy. Also, make sure your program is promoting competitions or challenges potentially on low carb or stay away from the sweets type challenge or stay away from the carbs. So, no white bread type competitions or things like that! It sounds silly, but getting people to promote those types of behaviors and for HRs to promote those types of behaviors is really important. Again, I’m not here to promote ketosis or keto, as they call it, or anything like that into your diet. But I will tell you that I’ve seen tremendous benefits and I will caution again to see a doctor at least every few weeks if you do something like this. You should get your blood tests and make sure your HDL and LDL are within the right range. So anyway hope this was helpful. Thanks so much everyone.